Leaders in any organization have a similar problem – they need to effectively communicate their strategic vision to drive durable growth.
When visualizing the progress made towards that vision, leaders must view a picture of their organization’s entire customer journey. HubSpot has made incremental progress on providing tools to show this and has provided a report that can capture the entire journey.
Enter Customer Journey Analytics!
Customer Journey Analytics depicts how efficient and varied your customer journey is for visitors, contacts, and customers. This is currently available to Marketing Enterprise customers. You can access these reports from Analytics Tools ⇒ Reports ⇒ Create Report ⇒ Customer Journey Reports in your HubSpot portal.
Go-To-Market teams can use customer journey reports to increase alignment, noting common mediums and channels visitors convert into contacts, and how they transition into opportunities. These reports can stimulate discussion, and provide impetus to enact forward looking change for your organization to grow better.
These reports are structured sequentially, showing the completion of steps – with additional pathways running parallel – to visualize … the journey!
Visualization options include a summarized table, horizontal or vertical funnels, and a Sankey chart -- which best depicts the nature of the journey. On the left hand side of the report are the attributes you can order into steps for interactions you would like to track.
You can add steps for contacts or deals, and filter based on any properties in either object. While the steps for deals are based on any available deal pipeline and stages available, contact stages are based on the below categories.
- Lifecycle stage
- Contact Information
- Ads
- CTAs
- Deal Stage
- Documents
- Forms
- Marketing Email
- Marketing Event
- Media
- Meetings
- Messaging
- Payments
- Sales Email
- Sequence
- Web pages
- Custom Behavioral Events
Even though this post goes into a few example reports, you can build any combination of a customer journey that makes sense for your organization. For more information, there are links to view a demo in the tool, as well as an introductory video from the HubSpot product team.
Below are some journey reports you can build and why they could be important.
Website Visitors ⇒ Leads
This journey report can tell your marketing department how effective you are in generating conversions from your web assets.
You can consolidate all mediums you generate traffic from – pages visited, ad interactions, and forms viewed – to view their effectiveness in conversions. Checking the box to include anonymous visitors could give you a more realistic picture of how much you are missing out based on all possible opportunities to generate net new contacts.
Depending on your demand generation strategy, you may include another stage to view progression on your conversions to engage with specific marketing emails (ex. Follow-up email sent after an initial website conversion).
Leads ⇒ Qualified Leads
Understanding how to generate more leads helps to better structure content categorized in the Awareness Stage of the buyer’s journey. That said, another example journey report you can create would be the path a contact takes to become a qualified lead – for marketing or sales purposes.
Your stages may vary from the example above, as it depends on the mediums you use to qualify your leads, and when you employ them. Structuring your mediums in the order that makes sense for your organization – email nurturing, paid ad interactions, attending marketing events – can depict the progression your contacts take and whether it is mirroring your vision.
Leads ⇒ Opportunities ⇒ Customers
Another example journey report that you can structure goes broader than the two previous examples, and visualizes the path contacts take through to becoming a customer. This report would help you identify deficiencies in your sales process, and areas of friction to prevent someone from closing as a customer.
Like the previous example, how you structure the stages may be slightly different, depending on how you conduct your sales process. In addition to including various sales nurturing tools done to move qualified leads through, you can include entrance into a particular stage. Unlike traditional funnel reports with deal stages, customer journey reports give you the ability to visualize the effectiveness of getting to a particular deal stages paired with the use of your sales tools. This report can display the “loopholes” anyone could take to become opportunities or customers without becoming qualified leads, which may be a positive takeaway to simplify your overall journey.
How about… the whole thing?!
Another journey report that can be built is the pathway from being a new customer – or opportunity – all the way through to someone being your organization’s evangelist!
This report is only as effective as your customer marketing or post point of sale operations to nurture net new evangelists. Filtering on the basis of tools relevant to your customers – possibly HubSpot payments and custom behavioral events – could show you how you are delighting your customers.
Applications for Customer Journey Reports
Beyond the aesthetically pleasing visualizations, customer journey reports give your organization the insights from where you can drive impactful change. Some immediate applications for these reports are outlined below.
- Understand opportunities with the Dropoff feature: The dropoff option shows you which contacts or deals did not make it to the next stage(s). Checking this gives you a reality check of where you journey fails to take advantage of conversions, making progress on your team metrics, and overall organizational goal.
- Read the journey: Leaders and other members of your team, who may not be aware of the specific actions your marketing and sales teams perform, can use these reports to better understand those behaviors in the context of the overall journey. This provides clarity within teams on what resources are needed – time, additional team members, money, and others.
- Where to cut extraneous steps: This was mentioned above, but situations with high conversion rates between a lesser performing stage may be the evidence you need to cut that step, or make it optional, to get people through your journey faster. Alternatively, your reports could result in discussions that allow for experiments from a marketing or sales perpsective.
- Align your Go-To-Market teams: The above points outline this, but your Go-To-Market teams can use these reports to comprehend which teams are performing well, which ones are underperforming, and how that will translate into resource allocation. Recurring conversations to review your customer journey can go a long way towards improving your organizational performance.
Conclusion
Customer Journey reports visualizes how effective your organization is at reducing your friction and increasing your force for your Flywheel. Beyond the examples provided above and its applications, the reports you build can empower your go-to-market teams to efficiently measure your organization’s velocity. Moreover, journey reports serve as the building blocks for aligning better when applying the insights gathered.
